Michael Cross

Michael Cross is the author of In Felt Treeling (Chax, 2008) and Haecceities (Cuneiform Press, 2010) and is one-time editor of Atticus/Finch chapbooks. He currently edits Compline and coedits On: Contemporary Practice (with Thom Donovan). Other projects include Involuntary Vision: After Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (Avenue B, 2003), Building is a process / Light is an element: Essays and Excursions for Myung Mi Kim (Queue Books, 2008), and a forthcoming collection of the George Oppen Memorial Lectures. He lives in Oakland, where he studies twenty-first-century poetry.

Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American literary theory. Pitch of Poetry is his irreverent guide to modernist and contemporary poetics."

Print of ‘Lyric Poetry’ by H. D. Walker, a mural in the Library of Congress, which appears as a Detroit Publishing Company postcard. Via Wikimedia Commons, courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Those interested in theorizing lyric must tread lightly these days, for a great deal of recent critical energy has been invested in sounding the historical and interpretive contours of this “super-sized” modern genre.[1] Much of this work seeks to disrobe lyric of its transhistorical pretensions, revealing by way of materialist critique that what we took for an enduring genre is actually a product of deeply codified — and distinctly post-Romantic — reading practices.